So taught the same lesson (roughly – some adjustments) to top and bottom sets this week. For our chocolate project, we were creating our financial model to work out costs and selling price of the chocolate bars. The top set, who are allegedly working at level 6+ were given less help, so they had the opportunity to work more independently, but with one exception had no clue what was going on. The normal teacher was despairing as well, which was good as it meant it wasn’t entirely down to my instructions! The next lesson would fall on the bank holiday so that means it’s another 4 weeks until their next lesson. It’s impossible to teach a class with this little contact. That’s 3 lessons in 8 weeks!
With the bottom set (there are only top and bottom sets incidentally) they were given a lot more assistance, templates etc. and…they still struggled. It’s not a problem of understanding, just lack of initiative. As soon as I reminded them anyone who hadn’t finished would be staying in at lunch time to finish, the work rate picked up remarkably. I still had three problems who didn’t do anything, so I had two of them back for lunch time detentions, and one after school, they all achieved more in the detentions than they have all year I think! The next lesson was supposed to be extending the model, but for quite a lot it will be finishing the basic version. Oh and the number of calculators being used…?!? About 50% of their ICT (at least) this year has been using Excel, and they still can’t associate with using formulae etc.
